The conviction of Michael J. Madigan on corruption and conspiracy charges marks a definitive end to the Daley-style machine era. There, we said it.
Yes, the federal jury that sat for months hearing and seeing mountains of evidence and then 11 days weighing the former speaker’s fate couldn’t agree on some of the counts and found him not guilty of a few others. But the takeaway here is that, particularly in the case of Madigan’s unholy alliance with Commonwealth Edison from 2011 to 2019, jurors agreed unanimously that Madigan was guilty of bribery and conspiracy. He was convicted on 10 counts.
There’s some nuance here in that jurors were deadlocked on the broad racketeering charge at the heart of the case. Madigan and his attorneys surely will emphasize that fact when we hear from them.
Still, call us naive, and we won’t take offense if you do, but we do think something monumental occurred here. Not once but twice — we include the convictions of the so-called ComEd Four in May 2023 — a jury of 12 ordinary Cook County residents was presented with voluminous evidence of self-serving plotting and grossly transactional political dealing and concluded that the most powerful politician in Illinois for decades and some in his orbit broke the law. Habitually.
In the trial of Madigan himself, who was prosecuted along with former close friend and longtime right-hand man Michael McClain, jurors concluded the former House speaker was guilty even after he took the shocking step of taking the stand in his own defense.
The “velvet hammer,” as Madigan was known over his many years in power, was used to bossing people around in Springfield and Chicago. With Madigan stripped of his powerful perch, his powers of persuasion were absent. Jurors didn’t buy his effort to distance himself from the machinations that McClain put into effect on his behalf, and they clearly believed McClain wasn’t acting on his own.
Ray Long: The rise and fall of House Speaker Michael Madigan, an Illinois titan
Jurors couldn’t reach a verdict on the charges against McClain, including counts on which they found Madigan guilty. McClain was one of the ComEd Four, all of whom were convicted on all counts tied to their part of the conspiracy to win favor from Madigan.
All told, between the two proceedings, McClain, who withstood what surely was intense federal pressure to cop a deal and testify against Madigan, ended up spending a mind-boggling 18 or so weeks on trial.
Despite the convictions, there’s still uncertainty whether Madigan — or McClain, for that matter — will spend even a day in federal prison. Madigan’s lawyers certainly will appeal the verdicts, as lawyers for the ComEd Four have with those earlier verdicts, and it’s no stretch to foresee one or both of the cases winding up before the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court in recent years has reined in prosecutors’ discretion in corruption actions against public officials, and one of those decisions in our own 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upended the legal interpretation prosecutors relied on extensively in the ComEd Four trial.
But, regardless of whether the 82-year-old Madigan ever does time, these cases have thrown open the curtains on the machine-style patronage politics Madigan wielded to keep his iron grip on power and the billings flowing at his property tax appeals law firm. Boss Madigan testified during the trial that he was the principal “rainmaker” for Madigan & Getzendanner, which made Madigan wealthy over decades.
It clearly wasn’t the former speaker’s winning personality that brought in all that business. As prosecutors demonstrated through recordings made by government mole Danny Solis, Madigan saw commercial property owners needing Chicago government approvals as a ripe source of business. Then-Ald. Solis, as chair of the City Council’s Zoning Committee, was happy to funnel supplicants before his panel to the speaker’s firm. Former Ald. Edward Burke, also a longtime city powerhouse as Finance Committee chairman, is in prison now for running essentially the same playbook.
Still, jurors deadlocked or found Madigan not guilty on the counts related to winning business for his law firm.
Madigan’s use of ComEd as a source of funneling cash to his political lieutenants in the form of no-work lobbying subcontracts formed the bulk of the feds’ case in 2023 against Madigan, McClain, former ComEd CEO Anne Pramaggiore and others. That conspiracy was in furtherance of preserving Madigan’s political power in Springfield, and the jurors in the speaker’s trial clearly reached the same conclusion as their counterparts in the earlier proceeding that Madigan’s relationship with ComEd was corrupt to the point of violating the law.
There will be much discussion of the meaning of the Madigan jury’s action. But this much we can say. Michael J. Madigan, the most feared and consequential individual in state politics for as long as most of us can remember, is now a convicted felon, due to how he ran his political and governmental operations.
Illinoisans owe the FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago an enormous debt of gratitude for the time and resources devoted to ridding state government of this corrupt, corrosive power broker. The evidence the feds compiled depicted the incessant grifting at the highest levels of government in ways we’d have loved to have seen depicted by the great Mike Royko, the ablest chronicler of our culture of corruption.
We’re reasonably sure the curmudgeonly columnist would have laughed derisively at our view that Madigan’s downfall marks a real turning point for our state and city.
We certainly agree that corruption and bribery won’t suddenly disappear from the political scene in Chicago and Illinois. Not as long as greed exists as part of the human condition.
But there’s at least the chance that graft on the industrial scale at which Madigan operated is history.
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